The End of Faith (24 page)

How can we encourage other human beings to extend their moral sympathies beyond a narrow
locus? How can we learn to be mere human beings, shorn of any more compelling national,
ethnic, or religious identity? We can be reasonable. It is in the very nature of reason to
fuse cognitive and moral horizons. Reason is nothing less than the guardian of love.

Morality and Happiness

The link between morality and happiness appears straightforward, though there is clearly
more to being happy than merely being

moral. There is no reason to think that a person who never lies, cheats, or steals is guaranteed to be happier than a person who com- mits each of these sins with abandon. As we all know,
a kind and compassionate person can still be horribly unlucky, and many a brute appears to
have seized Fortune herself by the skirts. Children born without a functioning copy of the
gene that produces the enzyme hypoxanthine-guanine phosphoribosyltransferase will have a
constellation of ailments and incapacities known as Lesch-Nyhan syndrome. They will also
compulsively mutilate themselves, possi- bly as a result of the build-up of uric acid in
their tissues. If left unrestrained, such children helplessly gnaw their lips and fingers
and even thrust pointed objects into their eyes. It is difficult to see how instruction in
morality will contribute meaningfully to their happiness. What these children need is not
better moral instruction, or even more parental love. They need hypoxanthine-guanine
phosphoribosyltransferase.

Without denying that happiness has many requisitesgood genes, a nervous system that does
not entirely misbehave, etc.we can hypothesize that whatever a person's current level of
happiness is, his condition will be generally improved by his becoming yet more loving and
compassionate, and hence more ethical. This is a strictly empirical claimone that has been
tested for millennia by contemplatives in a variety of spiritual traditions, especially
within Buddhism. We might wonder whether, in the limit, the unchecked growth of love and
compassion might lead to the diminution of a person's sense of well-being, as the
suffering of others becomes increasingly his own. Only people who have cultivated these
states of mind to an extraordinary degree will be in a position to decide this question,
but in the general case there seems to be no doubt that love and compassion are good, in
that they connect us more deeply to others.30

Given this situation, we can see that one could desire to become more loving and
compassionate for purely selfish reasons. This is a paradox, of sorts, because these attitudes undermine selfishness, by

definition. They also inspire behavior that tends to contribute to the happiness of other
human beings. These states of mind not only feel good; they ramify social relationships that lead one to feel good with others, leading others to feel good with oneself. Hate, envy, spite, disgust, shamethese are not
sources of happiness, personally or socially. Love and compassion are. Like so much that
we know about ourselves, claims of this sort need not be validated by a controlled study.
We can easily imagine evolutionary reasons for why positive social emotions make us feel
good, while negative ones do not, but they would be beside the point. The point is that
the disposition to take the happiness of others into accountto be ethicalseems to be a rational way to augment one's own happiness. As we will see in the next
chapter, the linkage here becomes increasingly relevant the more rarefied one's happiness
becomes. The connection between spiritualitythe cultivation of happiness directly, through
precise refinements of attentionand ethics is well attested. Certain atti- tudes and
behaviors seem to be conducive to contemplative insight, while others are not. This is not
a proposition to be merely believed. It is, rather, a hypothesis to be tested in the
laboratory of one's life.31

A Loophole for Torquemada?

Casting questions about ethics in terms of happiness and suffering can quickly lead us
into unfamiliar territory. Consider the case of judicial torture. It would seem, at first
glance, to be unambiguously evil. And yet, for the first time in living memory, reasonable
men and women in our country have begun to reconsider it publicly. Interest in the subject
appears to have been provoked by an inter- view given by Alan Dershowitz, an erstwhile
champion of the rights of the innocent-until-proven-guilty, on CBS's 60 Minutes.32 There, before millions who would have thought the concept of tor- ture impossible to
rehabilitate, Dershowitz laid out the paradig- matic ticking-bomb case.

Imagine that a known terrorist has planted a large bomb in the heart of a nearby city.
This man now sits in your custody. As to the bomb's location, he will say nothing except
that the site was chosen to produce the maximum loss of life. Given this state of
affairsin particular, given that there is still time to prevent an imminent atrocityit
seems there would be no harm in dusting off the strap- pado and exposing this unpleasant fellow to a suasion of bygone times.

Dershowitz has argued that this situation can be cast in terms that will awaken the Grand
Inquisitor in all of us. If a ticking bomb doesn't move you, picture your seven-year-old
daughter being slowly asphyxiated in a warehouse just five minutes away, while the man in
your custody holds the keys to her release. If your daughter won't tip the scales, then
add the daughters of every couple for a thousand milesmillions of little girls have, by
some perverse neg- ligence on the part of our government, come under the control of an
evil genius who now sits before you in shackles. Clearly, the conse- quences of one man's
uncooperativeness can be made so grave, and his malevolence and culpability so
transparent, as to stir even the most self-hating moral relativist from his dogmatic
slumbers.

It is generally thought that the gravest ethical problem we face in resorting to torture
is that we would be bound to torture some num- ber of innocent men and women. Most of us
who were eager to don the Inquisitor's cap in the case above begin to falter in more
realis- tic scenarios, as a person's guilt becomes a matter of some uncer- tainty. And
this is long before other concerns even attract our notice. What, for instance, is the reliability of testimony elicited under tor- ture ? We need not even pose questions of this sort yet,
since we have already balked at the knowledge that, in the real world, we will not be able
to tell the guilty from the innocent just by looking.

So it seems that we have two situations that will strike most sane and decent people as
ethically distinct: in the first case, as envisioned by Dershowitz, it seems perverse to
worry about the rights of an admitted terrorist when so many innocent lives are at stake;
while

under more realistic conditions, uncertainty about a person's guilt will generally
preclude the use of torture. Is this how the matter really sits with us? Probably not.

It appears that such restraint in the use of torture cannot be reconciled with our
willingness to wage war in the first place. What, after all, is “collateral damage” but
the inadvertent torture of inno- cent men, women, and children? Whenever we consent to
drop bombs, we do so with the knowledge that some number of children will be blinded,
disemboweled, paralyzed, orphaned, and killed by them. It is curious that while the
torture of Osama bin Laden him- self could be expected to provoke convulsions of
conscience among our leaders, the unintended (though perfectly foreseeable, and therefore
accepted) slaughter of children does not.

So we can now ask, if we are willing to act in a way that guaran- tees the misery and
death of some considerable number of innocent children, why spare the rod with suspected
terrorists? What is the difference between pursuing a course of action where we run the
risk of inadvertently subjecting some innocent men to torture, and pursuing one in which
we will inadvertently kill far greater num- bers of innocent men, women, and children?
Rather, it seems obvi- ous that the misapplication of torture should be far less troubling to us than collateral damage: there are, after all, no infants interned at Guantanamo Bay, just rather scrofulous young men, many of whom were caught in
the very act of trying to kill our soldiers.33 Torture need not even impose a significant risk of death or permanent injury on its
victims; while the collaterally damaged are, almost by defini- tion, crippled or killed.
The ethical divide that seems to be opening up here suggests that those who are willing to
drop bombs might want to abduct the nearest and dearest of suspected terroriststheir
wives, mothers, and daughtersand torture them as well, assuming anything profitable to our side might come of it. Admittedly, this would
be a ghastly result to have reached by logical argument, and we will want to find some way
of escaping it.34

In this context, we should note that many variables influence our

feelings about an act of physical violence, as well as our intuitions about its ethical
status. As Glover points out, “in modern war, what is most shocking is a poor guide to
what is most harmful.” To learn that one's grandfather flew a bombing mission over Dresden
in the Second World War is one thing; to hear that he killed five little girls and their
mother with a shovel is another. We can be sure that he would have killed more women and
girls by dropping bombs from pristine heights, and they are likely to have died equally
horrible deaths, but his culpability would not appear the same. Indeed, we seem to know,
intuitively, that it would take a different kind of per- son to perpetrate violence of the
latter sort. And, as we might expect, the psychological effects of participating in these
types of violence are generally distinct. Consider the following account of a Soviet
soldier in Afghanistan: “It's frightening and unpleasant to have to kill, you think, but
you soon realize that what you really find objec- tionable is shooting someone
point-blank. Killing en masse, in a group, is exciting, evenand I've seen this myselffun.”35 This is not to say that no one has ever enjoyed killing people up close; it is just that
we all recognize that such enjoyment requires an unusual degree of callousness to the
suffering of others.

It is possible that we are simply unequipped to rectify this dis- parityto be, in Glover's
terms, most shocked by what is most harmful. A biological rationale is not hard to find,
as millions of years on the African veldt could not possibly have selected for an ability
to make emotional sense of twenty-first-century horror. That our Paleolithic genes now
have chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons at their disposal is, from the point of
view of our evolution, little different from our having delivered this technology into the
hands of chimps. The difference between killing one man and killing a thousand just
doesn't seem as salient to us as it should. And, as Glover observes, in many cases we will
find the former far more dis- turbing. Three million souls can be starved and murdered in
the Congo, and our Argus-eyed media scarcely blink. When a princess dies in a car
accident, however, a quarter of the earth's population

falls prostrate with grief. Perhaps we are unable to feel what we must feel in order to
change our world.

What does it feel like to see three thousand men, women, and children incinerated and
crushed to ash in the span of a few seconds? Anyone who owned a television on September
11, 2001, now knows. But most of us know nothing of the sort. To have watched the World
Trade Center absorbing two jet planes, along with the lives of thou- sands, and to have
felt, above all things, disbelief, suggests some form of neurological impairment. Clearly, there are limits to what the human
mind can make of the deliverances of its sensesof the mere sight of an office building,
known to be full of people, dissolv- ing into rubble. Perhaps this will change.

In any case, if you think the equivalence between torture and col- lateral damage does not
hold, because torture is up close and per- sonal while stray bombs aren't, you stand
convicted of a failure of imagination on at least two counts: first, a moment's reflection
on the horrors that must have been visited upon innocent Afghanis and Iraqis by our bombs
will reveal that they are on par with those of any dungeon. That such an exercise of the
imagination is required to bring torture and collateral damage to parity accounts for the
disso- ciation between what is most shocking and what is most harmful that Glover notes.
It also demonstrates the degree to which we have been bewitched by our own euphemisms.
Killing people at a distance is easier, but perhaps it should not be that much easier.

Second, if our intuition about the wrongness of torture is born of an aversion to how
people generally behave while being tortured, we should note that this particular
infelicity could be circumvented pharmacologically, because paralytic drugs make it
unnecessary for screaming ever to be heard or writhing seen. We could easily devise
methods of torture that would render a torturer as blind to the plight of his victims as a
bomber pilot is at thirty thousand feet. Consequently, our natural aversion to the sights
and sounds of the dungeon provide no foothold for those who would argue against the use of
torture. To demonstrate just how abstract the torments

of the tortured can be made to seem, we need only imagine an ideal “torture pill”a drug
that would deliver both the instruments of torture and the instrument of their utter
concealment. The action of the pill would be to produce transitory paralysis and
transitory misery of a kind that no human being would willingly submit to a second time.
Imagine how we torturers would feel if, after giving this pill to captive terrorists, each
lay down for what appeared to be an hour's nap only to arise and immediately confess
everything he knows about the workings of his organization. Might we not be tempted to
call it a “truth pill” in the end?